Carnivore

ii) Commodi Immemor

STARTING AT A NEW SCHOOL HAD NEVER FELT SO NERVE-WRECKING FOR ZINNIA. And yet at the same time it felt horribly familiar, like walking on egg shells trying to avoid attention, to avoid any sort of notice.

It was different, but at the same, it was something she was as used to as breathing.

The anxiety hadn't failed to continue gnawing in the pit of her stomach, chewing at her innards and threatening to send her spiralling to nausea. It raked at the back of her chest, as if scratching against her heart, pressing on her lungs as if to squeeze all the air from her grasp.

And yet, just as she did at her old school, she managed to shove it into the back of her mind and continue, expression blank and her gaze purely upon navigating through the sea of students that were sprinting past her, as if there was some great spectacle back out the front of the building that was of everyone's interest.

Undoubtedly, if she was attending the same school as Kirishima, she wouldn't have any fears. But it did her no good to contemplate those small factors when she was already walking through the gates of what may very well become hell.

Yes, she was a pessimist, but it was much better than falling prey to naivety.

Her attention was upon locating her homeroom, though as she walked she took note of the many classrooms along the way. A building with each of its years on its own level from first to third respectively, Zinnia walked past numbered rooms and allocated subject premises until finally, right at the furtherest end of the hall was a door labelled 1-F, which was Zinnia's particular room if her particular paperwork was anything to go by.

The room was a simple setup of plain, wooden desks with matching chairs, seating thirty students in what was perhaps a little closer proximity than Zinnia had felt necessary. The walls were bare, the blackboard up the front roughly wiped of chalk, aside from the date in the bottom right corner, a rough, carelessly written seating allocation presumably from the teacher, and the faint hints of last year's residual farewell message remaining upon the dusty board. In fact, there were scuff marks across the linoleum floor, a layer of dust covering both desks and chairs, as well as a kind of musty, stale odour to the classroom that showed a lack of common maintenance.

It was sign enough that corners were cut when it came to cleaning, and perhaps in a sense that contributed to the lower fees of the school.

At least, Zinnia hoped it did.

But she certainly didn't expect it to.

There were already students in the room, Zinnia noted as she found a group of about seven rather regular looking girls gathered in the back right corner of the room, closest to the windows. All dressed in the red and black uniform of a tartan skirt and blazer, all with appearances that reminded Zinnia of some of the most normal people she had met. People like her parents and siblings. Not a single one of them had visible peculiarities derived from quirk development, no scales, no strange hair colours or mutations at all.

And just like her siblings, these girls of brunette, blonde and black hair assorted were laughing and gossiping vainly.

Zinnia let out a breath as she looked down at her paperwork to find her student number, which was numbered 29, back row, second from the window right where those girls were. In fact, they had surrounded the desk and the one in front of it, making for an unpleasant situation, should Zinnia choose to broach it.

Well, it looked like she either had to kick them out from her desk or just choose some other until her allocated one was freed up. Neither was particularly preferable, but given the facts, Zinnia opted for the second choice. She chose the desk in the opposite corner of the back and sat herself down. She pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose and pulled out one of her extra textbooks from within her bag.